Street record squeaks in

THE “per­fect” fam­ily home in a tree-lined street in Rand­wick sold for a street record yes­ter­day of $3.54 mil­lion.

But noth­ing’s ever quite per­fect — the heady days of ex­cited, happy buy­ers fall­ing over them­selves to bid ap­pear to be over.

It took some skilled op­er­a­tors to off­load the four-bed­room Cal­i­for­nian bun­ga­low at 1 Mon­mouth St, Rand­wick, owned by the for­mer head of fran­chise at McGrath, Gary Vouris, and the re­sult was just $40,000 above its re­serve. The Agency’s auc­tion­eer, Thomas McG­lynn, faced three hard-faced ac­tive bid­ders. The open­ing of­fer for the home that “ticked all the boxes” was $3.2 mil­lion, from a Belle­vue Hill woman and her son.

“This is cheap and cheery at this level — can I say $3.3 mil­lion,” McG­lynn asked.

When the next bid­der of­fered $3.25 mil­lion, he tried again. “Would you make it 3?” No, $3.25.

Luck­ily, the first bid­der clearly had the dol­lars and he im­me­di­ately got to his $3.3 mil­lion.

Dur­ing the next long pause, McG­lynn ad­vised his au­di­ence to “breathe for a mo­ment — give every­one a mo­ment to think things through”.

He looked ready to pass the prop­erty in, but the sec­ond bid­der’s of­fer of $3.35 mil­lion came “right on the death knock”. There were sev­eral more pauses, too, with McG­lynn at one point re­mind­ing the gath­er­ing: “I need to know if you’re in or out … other­wise it’s back to realestate.com.au, back to the Went­worth Courier.”

Things got mod­er­ately ex­cit­ing for a few ticks when the third bid­der en­tered the race. And af­ter a few more words of en­cour­age­ment from McG­lynn — “I don’t want you to have deep re­gret”; “there’s no sec­ond prizes”; “seize the mo­ment” — it was all over.

And sur­prise, sur­prise, it was the cashed-up buy­ers from Belle­vue Hill who won the day. Mr Vouris said he was “very sat­is­fied” and his wife Paula agreed, adding that a $30,000 freshen-up had “made a huge dif­fer­ence”.

The last sale in the street was $2.475 mil­lion for a two-bed­der on a 310sqm block in March. Mr Vouris’s home was on a 338sqm block.

The Agency’s Ben Col­lier said the price guide in the Agency agree­ment was $3.2 mil­lion to $3.5 mil­lion, so they’d ex­ceeded that.

There were 766 auc­tions sched­uled for across Syd­ney yes­ter­day. With 669 of the re­sults col­lected by last night, CoreLogic put the clear­ance rate at 70.36 per cent.